Practice of Innovation: A Value-Creation Workshop to Significantly Improve the Results from NSF's R&D and Commercialization Initiatives

National Collegiate Inventors And Innovators Alliance, Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

A Value-Creation Workshop for NSF's R&D and Commercialization Initiatives The systematic creation of high-value innovations from research represents a primary path for America to achieve growth, prosperity, meaningful jobs, social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and national security. Today, most measures of innovative success from basic and applied research and other innovation programs are relatively poor. Successful innovation is the result of learning and creating fast; not failing fast, as some believe. It is a discipline based on both learning-science fundamentals and experiential practice. Successful innovation is a discipline that can be taught, applied, and improved. This initiative is an immersive, hands-on, workshop and coaching program. The workshop uses a value creation playbook, which satisfies the fundamental requirements for innovative success. To be systematically successful, professionals must understand value-creation concepts and language; have fundamental mental frameworks for collecting essential knowledge; and be able to rapidly create new value using learning best practices, such as continuous, unrelenting team-based iteration. The initial workshop teaches professionals the right questions to ask and gives them the framework for improved R&D and innovative achievement. However, it is the continuous use of these principles that makes the biggest difference. R&D achievement and innovative success are the result of a continuous learning process. Programs that do not require a continuous value-creation process are of limited or no utility. These fundamental principles are the intellectual basis of the workshop. Professionals and students with these innovative skills inevitability become some of the most productive researchers and innovators in their fields. The use of these practices can help catalyze a major competitive advantage for the United States, create a large number of new jobs, and educate the workforce required for our global innovation economy.